Famous Novelists on Symbolism in Their Work and Whether It Was Intentional
It was 1963, and 16-year-old Bruce McAllister was sick of symbol-hunting in English class. Rather than quarrel with his teacher, he went straight to the source: McAllister mailed a crude, four-question survey to 150 novelists, asking if they intentionally planted symbolism in their work. Seventy-five authors responded. Here’s what they had to say.
IT DOESN’T MATTER IF THE AUTHOR PUT IT THERE INTENTIONALLY OR NOT. That is not the point. Reading is not a game of Clue; books are not a mystery that you have to solve by putting all the pieces together. That’s not the point. Find the meaning you want to find in it. That’s what we do with books because that’s what we do in life.
What Margaret said. If the point of reading is merely to understand precisely what the author intended, then reading is just this miserable one-sided conversation in which an author is droning on to you page after page after page and the reader just sits there receiving a monologue.
That’s not reading. That’s listening.
Reading is the active co-creation of a story, complete with all its symbols and abstractions.
To read well, you have to understand that sometimes an oligarchic pig is not just an oligarchic pig. Maybe Orwell intended Animal Farm to be about how dangerous pigs can be. Maybe he had a personal vendetta against pigs. It doesn’t matter. Animal Farm happens to say a lot about how humans organize themselves, and how power and social status shape our understanding of justice. It happens to capture the limits of human empathy, and how those limitations can lead to structural inequality.
I don’t see how it matters at all whether Orwell intended his book to be as good as it turned out to be. So when the story above says that a 16-year-old went “straight to the source,” the article is dead wrong, because every story has two sources: writer and reader.
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Yes this to all of the above, but also: If your students are bored and stressed about finding the symbolism in the reading material, you’re not being an effective teacher. Maybe it’s because you’ve chosen material that’s not relevant to the lives and experiences of your students. Maybe it’s because you’re not presenting it in a way that makes it interesting. Maybe it’s something else entirely.
But teachers could learn a TON from fandom re: how to make deep analysis of media not only fun and interesting, but downright engrossing. If your lesson plan doesn’t include TVTropes for example (presuming of course that you and your students have at least some access to the internet, which I know isn’t true for all school districts) YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.
If you’re not ASKING the students what they get from a reading before you TELL THEM what they’re supposed to be reading from it and what the accepted theories of literary critics are, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.
If your curriculum is entirely made of book by dead white guys (extra points if they’re all from Europe and Colonial America and it’s -not- a really specific college-level course titled ‘English literature at the turn of the 20th century’) YOU ARE DOING IT SO FUCKING WRONG.
